Meet the volunteers supporting Cathays’ other very special residents
EACH morning, the camera hidden in Louise Kane’s garden on Maindy Road in Cardiff is checked – not for footage of intruders but for other prickly visitors.
Hedgehogs have long been regular visitors to her garden, captured on the wildlife camera she had installed. But one morning, when checking the footage, she noticed something unusual.
Caught on camera was a hedgehog with what looked like a milkshake lid stuck around its neck. As it was daylight when she checked the camera, the hog was gone. Knowing it could not remove the lid itself, her husband chose to stay up the following night to wait for the hedgehog’s return. He removed the lid once the little creature reappeared.
This rescue is just one part of wider work done across Cathays by a range of residents, students and volunteers to support a hedgehog population hidden in the area. And as hedgehogs hibernate through the winter, work done to feed and protect them has increased.
‘We’re hedgehog nerds’
The hedgehogs captured on camera in Mrs Kane’s garden are able to enter it thanks to a hedgehog highway that she created with her neighbour Georgina Taubman, connecting their gardens with a tunnel through their garden walls.
Doing this wasn’t easy, however. As their gardens were separated by a brick wall, creating a tunnel required the use of a cordless power drill.
Photo: The Cardiffian.
Photo: Georgina Taubman
But it was all worth it to have hedgehogs in her garden, though some of the ones Mrs Kane finds are “so big they can’t even get through the hole”.
For her, it’s “amazing” to have hedgehogs regularly roam her garden. In the summer, they’ve sometimes had up to eight hedgehogs at any one time. Her two border terriers, Seren and Tobi, don’t seem to mind the hedgehogs either.
Mrs Taubman would call the two of them “hedgehog nerds”. For her, it took two days after constructing the hedgehog highway before she started seeing hedgehogs. Like her neighbour, she also uses a wildlife camera to keep track of nighttime visitors to her garden.
“Hedgehogs really are energetic, and you don’t realise it until you start putting out nighttime cameras.”
While technology captures the hedgehogs at night, she’s also seen plenty with her own eyes, pointing out that “if you stay still, they will just walk past you”.
While estimating exactly how many hedgehogs there are in Britain is difficult, a 2022 report from the British Hedgehog Preservation Society suggests populations have been on a historic decline.
Rural hedgehog numbers remain low, but urban populations have started to stabilise and recover. This is partly due to urban gardens giving hedgehogs spaces to roam.
As residents, they hope to make their road hedgehog friendly. But as hedgehogs are known to travel more than a mile each night, these animals receive the support of others in the nearby area too.
‘They live so close to where we study everyday’
Though hedgehogs aren’t the first thing that come to mind when thinking of academia, they regularly roam around land belonging to Cardiff University. Wanting to protect these animals, the university joined the national Hedgehog Friendly Campus (HFC) campaign in 2021.
Creating hedgehog friendly campuses helps all wildlife. University biodiversity officer Mafalda Costa, who runs the scheme points out that “everyone loves hedgehogs”. For her, they help symbolise wider plans to help improve biodiversity around the entire university.
Making the campus hedgehog friendly has involved making land wilder, by letting grass grow long and creating piles of leaves and logs where wildlife can flourish. “Animals like untidiness, but some people don’t understand this,” says Dr Costa.
Look closely, and the signs of HFC’s work can be seen everywhere around the university. Quite literally in fact, as volunteers pushed to install hedgehog crossing signs behind the Hadyn Ellis building to help keep the creatures safe near traffic. Mrs Kane hopes the signs will be installed on nearby Maindy Road, too.
Though hedgehogs appreciate untidiness in nature, litter in the area is a problem and can seriously harm hedgehogs, as Mrs Kane found out first hand.
For this reason, the scheme has organised a number of litter picks, often involving both students and residents, including a number recently done as part of the national HFC Pick4Prickles challenge that took place in November.
Volunteering with the scheme can give students a chance to see hedgehogs up close rather than just catching a fleeting glimpse of them while out at night.
“You do get quite a lot of people actually saying they come back from nights out at three or four in the morning and they’ll just see a hedgehog running along the road,” says student Ellie Lewis.
Currently completing a master’s in biosciences, she has volunteered to help the HFC scheme for the last two years. For her, it’s been special to be able to see hedgehogs “so close to where we study every day”.
Another part of volunteers’ work involves putting up ‘hedgehog hotels’, small wooden shelters that offer hedgehogs space, water, and food. Many of these hotels around the university were built by Bob Rogers, a hedgehog champion for the scheme.
Working for the university, his job gives him responsibility over biodiversity around the Haydn Ellis building. Mr Rogers builds these hotels in his own garage, recycling old materials such as pellets left by the university.
Photo: The Cardiffian.
Some of the hotels he’s built even function as bug hotels too, with space for bugs on the top and for hedgehogs on the bottom. He says he’s “not sure how the bugs like it because hedgehogs love bugs”. In other words, they love to eat them.
These hedgehog homes are often sold to local families, with the money then donated to local hedgehog rescue centres. This includes a centre in Caerphilly, which is where most of Cardiff’s hedgehogs needing care end up.
The university helps rescue centres in other ways too, donating expired medical gloves and old newspapers, which are used to line the inside of hedgehog beds.
‘This is the worst year we’ve had’
Dave Williams at Caerphilly Hedgehog Rescue told of the pressure the centre is under, currently facing an unprecedented demand for spaces for hedgehogs in need of care.
“We’ve taken in 300 this year, the worst year we’ve had,” he reveals.
Hedgehogs needing care are brought to the centre by members of the public. One sign that a hedgehog isn’t feeling right is simply seeing one during the day. As Dr Costa puts it, “if you see one sunbathing in the day, it’s in danger”.
Though places may be in short supply, Mr Williams urges the public to never take care of hedgehogs themselves. Instead they should phone the nearest hedgehog rescue as they might be able to find a place elsewhere.
As for helping hedgehogs more generally, Caerphilly hedgehog rescue suggests leaving water and food for them, preferably meaty dog or cat food. They also suggest letting an area of gardens grow wild.
Of course, this is advice that some homes, such as those on Maindy Road, have long followed. Both Mrs Taubman and Mrs Kane work closely with the rescue centre, as healthy hedgehogs are released back into the wild from their gardens. Mrs Taubman even likens it to a hedgehog delivery service as “they do a sort of return to sender thing”.
She’s happy with the work she does for hedgehogs, saying that “even if it’s just me opening up my garden, even if it’s just one extra place for them to visit”, it’s all worthwhile. As hedgehogs hibernate this winter, they need all the help they can get.
There is one member of her household who isn’t a fan of hedgehogs, however – her cat Rocky, who’d much prefer to eat the food left in her garden instead.
Caerphilly Hedgehog Rescue can be contacted at 07915 884419. Further information on hedgehog care can be found at The British Hedgehog Preservation Trust’s website.
